Thursday, March 10, 2016

Life lately

Well hello there. It seems like I blinked and another 2 months flew by without much of a life update. It's just that I've been so busy talking about other things that are blog-worthy that I forget to talk about myself or my own life sometimes, which is I guess another important aspect of a blog. Oops. I do a lot more random updating and personal sharing on my social media sites, so really, Instagram and Facebook are the best ways to keep up on that these days.

So we all know I'm pregnant. Yay. Don't let my lack of excitement scare you...I am excited but I'm also really, really stressing out and worrying about logistics involving baby number 4 coming along so soon. Bigger house, new car, more baby gear, etc. I mentioned before that I'm anxious about the small age gap between the new baby and Harper, and I've voiced my concerns over my ability to handle everything. Don't get me wrong, I am excited. But I'm also experiencing a crazy amount of stress that I've never really had while pregnant with any of my other babies...I feel like I'm just thinking about things too much. Plus I've been really sick and throwing up a lot, which isn't fun. Some days it's just morning sickness, while other days it's all day nausea. That part seems to be tapering off a bit, though, so let's hope and pray that it's gone for good and I can at least not feel like crap all day. It will work out. We can do this. Yay baby number four!

My first baby girl, Lily, just turned 8. This makes my heart hurt. She was my baby for so long- she can't really be 8. She's in 2nd grade now and her teacher (like all of the others) adores her. She's been student of the month (the first month!), earned academic achievement awards every quarter, reads at the highest level for her grade, and her teacher just recommended she be tested for their advanced program. I'm so proud of her for being such a great little student! Can we just talk about birthday cakes for a second? I'm really bad at making them...I've had some pretty ugly disasters when it comes to the frosting and decorating part, and this year was no exception. Lily wanted a purple cake with black writing. Sounds easy enough, right? I made a 2-layer round chocolate cake and tried my hand at making purple frosting with some traditional food coloring. Why is purple such a hard color to make? I'm not sure what the heck happened, but somehow I ended up with a gray-ish purple-tinged frosting that didn't look very appetizing. Maybe I'll stick to buying cakes from the grocery store bakery!

Lily's birthday was pretty low-key because we were still exhausted from our trip to Kaua'i, Hawaii! I can't believe our trip has already come and gone, but we went and it was amazing. If you recall, one of my BFFs was having a destination wedding in Kaua'i- her favorite vacation destination and place where she was engaged the year before. My husband and I had never been on a trip like this together, ever- not even a honeymoon! We decided I decided we had to go, so we made it happen. I got some snide comments and side-eyes from people while I was planning this trip- kind of like "if I can't afford to Hawaii how can you?" type of thing, but whatever. It was not nearly as expensive as I thought it was going to be, and my husband and I both busted our asses to make enough money for that trip to happen. And you know what? We're adults, and if we want to take a trip once in 12 years we can! You can too. Just plan it and make it happen. We watched plane ticket prices and bought when they were cheap, and we stayed at a moderately priced Marriot & bundled an economy-sized car with it for an extra $10 a day (the car was tiny, but it was just the two of us and it got great gas mileage! We drove a lot). We didn't really pay for any entertainment (no fancy helicopter rides or guided tours for us- we found free things to do ourselves and saved money), so we pretty much only paid for gas and food. We even splurged on a few fancy dinners, like the lobster and prime rib buffet at our hotel, because it was our last night there and we realized how little we had spent during the trip. So a trip like that is really as expensive as you decide to make it. We had an awesome time and made it affordable for us. We will definitely be taking some more trips just the two of us because we realized the awesome alone time we'd been missing all those years. I'm telling you, if you've never taken a couple's getaway to a tropical paradise- do it!

This was our gorgeous sunrise view from the hotel pool.

Our sweet rental car. $20 a day & 42 miles/gallon.

Since returning home from Hawaii, the crappy "is it spring yet?" Pacific Northwest weather has got me in a funk. It's cold, wet, gray, and I miss the sun. The lack of sunshine sometimes really affects me, I've noticed. I just get cranky and bored. I'm so ready for it to be spring so that I can plant my flowers and get started on my container garden again.

Speaking of flowers, my husband got me some gorgeous ones after a pretty bad day. I called them my I'm-sorry-you're-pregnant-and-bitchy flowers. They smell so good and really brightened up my day.